Counting number of layers returned by g.list in GRASS GIS

Author: Paulo van Breugel
Updated on: 2015-09-24

I am running a script that is producing a very large number of layers. As it takes a while, I wanted to find out how many layers were already created using the command line. Trivial thing perhaps, but I wasn’t really sure how to do it. After a bit of search, one way I found uses the versatile awk command line tool.

In the code below the g.list function is used to list all layers in the mapset VECEA. This is passed to (piped) as an array to awk, which splits the array and counts the elements.

There are other, possibly better, ways, but this is quick and easy enough for my purposes.

Tags

Software: @grassgis@awk
Tools: @g_list

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